Android

At JOANNEUM REASEARCH we are currently working on an augmented reality game using a Head-Up-Displays. As the availability of Google Glass is very limited at the moment, we were looking for alternatives and found a couple of competitors which could take the competition with Google Glass. Finally we decided for the French company Optinvent working on a Head-Up-Display prototype called ORA (http://optinvent.com/see-through-glasses-ORA) offering good specifications and a rich set of additional hardware like sensors, microphones, speakers etc.

Shortly I had some unexpected behaviour while testing the android version of the airTracker. While debugging this issue I realized that there is a big difference between the onStop() and the onPause() method provided by the Activty class.

To bring a little bit more color into GUI of the airTracker we decided to ink the text color of the text fields depending on the concentration value e.g. if the concentration value is less than 5 than the text should be inked light green, if the concentration is above 30 the text color gets more and more dark orange.

It's been a while since my last article. A couple of days ago I needed to access a private class member. After a short google search I found some that helped me perfectly. By using this "workaround" not only private class members can be accessed it also works for private methods. Here is an explanation this can be done can be found here

Shortly I was looking for a frame generator where I can put in a screenshot from iPhone or iPad and then automatically a screenshot with the device's frame is created.

Something identically has already been existing for Android for a longer time, for iOS I needed to dig a little bit deeper, however after a couple of blog and stackoverflow postings I discovered two nice solutions for Apple and one that is already popular for Android.

The first solution for a Apple frame generator can be found directly on the Apple developer site, however the integration of the screenshot needs to be done with Photoshop. The second solution is straight forward and is not for Apple only, it is a Android frame generator too.

For Android device's only a frame generator can be found on the Android Asset Studio homepage a really nice place for discovering cool tools. A look onto this page is really worth seeing.

I have started developing on Android about a year ago and something I really like on Android are these nice and straightforward to use Toast messages. It is a discrete way to inform the user about e.g currently executing tasks, finished tasks or may things that ended up with an error. In contrast to iOS UIAlertView the user does not need to push the OK button to dismiss the dialog, it disappears automatically after a pre-defined duration.

For the new version v1.1 of the airTracker I was looking for a counterpart of this Android Toast message and within a few minutes of google search I found a couple of nice projects people have already implemented. Some were quite nice however one did fit absolutely my needs. The project can be downloaded from Charles Scalessec's GIT repository and contains the Toast-implementation and an example how to use it. The project is already compatible with ARC by adding the compiler flag "-fno-obj-arc", the minimum requirement for iOS is 4.0.

Time goes by so fast, I was a little bit surprised to see that my last post was one month ago. So let's go..

Sometimes it is neccessary to get notfied if the application is sent to the background or recoveres back to foreground. As I started developing apps on iOS I was used that there is a central mechanism to check wheter the app is created, destroyed, started, stop etc. However in Android this central functionality is missing. So we need to implement a little workaround by implementing a base class every Activity inherits from.

For those who already use API level 14 or higher, the approach proposed by mjbshaw should be prefered unless follow the example shown in the implementation part below.

Sometimes it can be really interesting and helpful if there would be a chance to analyze and monitor the traffic of a potential iOS app. Maybe you just want to know what kind of services this app is using, maybe you want to take a closer look behind the scenes e.g. where does the app get its data from.

For the new project I currently working on, I need to focus on Facebook's Android SDK in more detail as I did in the past. A couple of months ago I had to integrate Facebook functionalities like login/logout, image uploading and status posting for the Next Liberty Theatre - Photo Component - it was not a big throw. In this new project the general focus is on lcoation-based augmented reality in combination with social media like Facebook.

This article exceptionally won't deal with the typical development stuff. As most of you already know, Apple has launched its iPad mini which should be a competition to smaller tablets like Asus Nexus 7. After the upsurge under the guru Steve Jobs, Apple's innovation motor starts more and more to stutter. In this article I want to present some of my personal opinion respective the iPad mini and if it can take the competition with tablets like the Asus Nexus 7.